Audio Update: This is a new change in 2020 to my blogs, I will now be adding at the top of the pages audio recordings of the content below.

This will be the first proper post for my upcoming blog. This blog will be running on jekyll and hosted on github pages. I have a background using WordPress for blogging but overall I have never enjoyed the experience of WordPress. WordPress has always felt too heavy and bloated. My needs are fairly simple at this point. Jekyll with github pages is what I have been looking for and it just passed under my radar recently. I’ve wanted to have a website/blog that is automatically up to date with a simple git push command and here it is.

So far my work flow has been to use git via CLI and to then run code . to launch Visual Studio Code as my IDE/Text Editor to modify .markdown files. Most of the time I work on my laptop so I only need to run commands such as git add ., git commit -m "", and git push. Sometimes I like to switch to my desktop so that includes a simple git pull to get up to date on the state of this blog. I find it really simple.

Also curious if keeping a blog hosted on github will make my github account look more active, but also actually keeping me more involved in my coding projects. The main two focuses for my personal github projects are learning python using my Battlefield Simulator codebase and writing this blog.

To be seen is how this blog survives as Jekyll when I try to introduce media such as photos, audio (potentially podcast) and videos. I might look toward AWS S3 buckets to support that path of hosting larger files.

Additional update, I am looking for a way to move my workflow to the cloud so that it does not matter which device I want to work from. I could do branching to move half written articles around, but that feels dirty.

Update again: I got another reminder of one of the reasons I wanted to switch away from a over built blogging platform. With WordPress I would get a lot of spam to my email account that was associated wth the blog. I had the commenting feature turned on initial hoping for feedback and instead it was again just spam. I have no intention to turn on comments with this current blog. If I am looking for feedback I’d probably request it directly or post on social media where comments can live away from the blog and keep this site uncluttered.

Enjoy this image test :)

Using this caricature as a test